Speakers

Ron Sims

Sims is on the Board of Directors of the Washington Health Alliance, formerly the Puget Sound Health Alliance, a nonprofit organization he helped found where employers, physicians, hospitals, patients, health plan providers and others from throughout the region come together to improve health care quality.

Sims served as the Deputy Secretary for the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development from 2009 to 2011. He was appointed by President Obama and unanimously confirmed by the U.S. Senate. As the second most senior official at HUD, Sims managed the day-to-day operations of an agency with 8,500 employees and an operating budget of nearly $40 billion.Prior to his appointment at HUD, Sims served for 12 years as the elected Executive of Martin Luther King, Jr. County in Washington State, the 13th largest county in the nation with 1.8 million residents and 39 cities including the cities of Seattle, Bellevue and Redmond.

As County Executive, Sims was nationally recognized for his work on the integration of environmental, social equity and public health policies that produced groundbreaking work on climate change, health care reform, affordable housing, mass transit, environmental protection, land use, and equity and social justice.

Born in Spokane, Washington in 1948, Sims is a graduate of Central Washington University.

Stephanie Altman

Stephanie Altman is Assistant Director of Health Care Justice at the Sargent Shriver National Center on Poverty Law. Stephanie specializes in Medicaid, Medicare, and health insurance issues. She represents children and adults in individual and class actions related to health care equity and also advocates for quality, accessible health care through administrative and legislative avenues. Stephanie earned her law degree from Loyola University School of Law and a BA from Grinnell College. She received the 2011 Loretta Lacey Child Health Advocacy Award from the Illinois Maternal Child Health Coalition, the Esther R. Rothstein Award in 2010 from the Lawyers Trust Fund of Illinois and the Child Health Advocates Award in 2005 from the American Academy of Pediatrics. She was named a Trial Lawyer of the Year Finalist in 2006 by Trial Lawyers for Public Justice.

David Treering

David Treering is the Geographic Information Systems Specialist at Loyola University Chicago’s Institute of Environmental Sustainability, where he has worked since 2005. David specializes in data manipulation, spatial analysis, web-based software development and information visualization. He holds a BS in Geography from Northern Arizona University, a Certificate in GIS from DePaul University and an MS in Software Engineering from Loyola University Chicago.

David E. Jacobs, PhD, CIH

Dr. Jacobs is an adjunct professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago School of Public Health. He is also the research director at the National Center for Healthy Housing and the Director of the World Health Organization Collaborating Center on Healthy Housing Research and Training. He has published numerous peer-reviewed papers on healthy homes, the relationship between lead paint and window replacement, intervention efficacy and hazard detection and many other papers. He has testified before Congress on 7 occasions. He is the scientific editor of a recent WHO book on the Population Attributable Fraction of Disease related to inadequate housing. He is the principal author of the President’s Task Force report on childhood lead poisoning 2000. Dr. Jacobs helped design the Evaluation of the HUD Lead Hazard Control grant program and is the PI on a study of housing ventilation in a randomized controlled trial. He is the principal author of the 1999 Report to Congress that launched the nation’s Healthy Homes Initiative. Dr. David Jacobs is the Director of Research at the National Center for Healthy Housing in the US. He previously worked at the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development as Director of the Office of Healthy Homes and Lead Hazard Control, where he was responsible for policy development, grants management, enforcement, public education and training, and research.